Nonlinear Lead-Lag Controller Synthesis for Unstable Nonlinear Systems

A new systematic procedure for synthesis of nonlinear lead-lag controllers for highly nonlinear unstable plants is developed. The procedure is to stabilize the unstable plant followed by generation of sinusoidal-input describing function (SIDF) models at various operating regimes of interest. The unstable plant frequency domain behavior is extracted, and a set of linear lead-lag controllers are designed that would force the open-loop behavior of the system (comprised of the lead-lag controller and the nonlinear plant) and mimic that of desired. Finally, a describing function inversion is used, and the nonlinear functions describing the values of the lead-lag coefficients as a function of the error signal are obtained. Experimental results are presented for verification, and bounded-input bounded-output stability is demonstrated by successful generation of the describing function models of the closed-loop system comprised of the synthesized nonlinear lead-lag controller and the nonlinear plant.